


Flying Lessons

by spacestationtrustfund



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, crossposting from other platforms, embarrassing fic I would never dream of writing now, me; returning to the mcu years after I swore I had converted to dc: someone please stop me.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-03 22:38:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14579139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacestationtrustfund/pseuds/spacestationtrustfund
Summary: A rehabilitation, in several steps. (A work in progress.)





	Flying Lessons

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in 2013. Technically unfinished, but my track record says it's unlikely to GET finished, so it is what it is.

**I.**

 

The undulating surface of the water rippled by, unconcerned and glittering. A small, brightly-coloured insect hovered delicately just above the trembling skin of the surface, dipped down, flitted back up and towards the bank, the rich earth fuzzed with intermittent green. From the bank opposite smoke drifted leisurely into the air, a thick, dark stain on the seemingly idyllic scene. Bits of burning or charred metal wedged into the yielding dirt. Somewhere, below the rippling river, half-hidden in the cool depths, a flash of blue and red and white. The insect circled the bank, gained altitude, and sped away.

As the cloying clouds of smoke and residual flame began to dissipate, the sun emerged to beat ceaselessly down upon the river bank, where two human shapes were, wet and muddy, as if they had emerged from the river itself: one, standing, looking down on the other, who lay supine on the ground, eyes closed, skin painted with purple and yellow bruises.

The man who stood released his grip on the other and took a hesitant step back, uncertain and conflicted. He had the bearing of a soldier—stiffly weary, stuck on repeat in a war that only perpetuated in his mind. Almost oddly self-conscious, he looked down at his torn clothes, soaked with river water and stained with a dark and sticky liquid that looked like blood.

The smoke and the river slid by; the soldier continued to gaze down at the unconscious body of his companion, his eyebrows drawn together, his mouth turned down slightly, his dark eyes in a state of darker turmoil. His right arm hung at an awkward angle; his left arm was made of metal. After another few moments, an agonising internal struggle, he turned as if to walk away. An instant, barely perceptible, of hesitation; then he turned back around and strode towards the body of the other, silent as a cat, silent as death.

A flash of metal and a rustle of black fabric; his injured arm took his full weight, but his face showed no pain as he knelt on the grassy furze-spotted bank. His face was blank, unreadable, unreachable. He reached out towards the other man, touching his exposed neck with the metal fingers, feeling for the fragile wingbeat of a pulse.

There was a terrifying moment when he did not find it, and the look on his face was frightening to see: whether he knew why or not, the death of the man before him would mean his own. But the unfeeling fingers marked how the blood beat under the bruised skin, how the heartbeats jumped like trains switching tracks. He drew back his hand as if in shame. It was almost relief on his face, brought on by the reassurance of life, but not quite. Some part of him wondered if he should try to remove the water from the man’s lungs, replace it with oxygen, but he did not know how: his hands were able to harm, not to heal.

He fit his knuckles carefully to the bruises blooming on the other man’s pallid skin. His eyes raked the length of the man’s body, taking in the blood on his blue suit. Bullet wounds, three or four of them, to the stomach and the chest. Bullets from his gun. It was a wonder that the man was not dead.

The sun continued its pulsing rhythm. A faint breeze whispered through the trees, lulling a name: it could not be his; he had no name. Again, he touched the face if the other man. It would be easy to kill him, too easy almost, to cover his mouth and rip the air from his lungs. To leave him to choke on the river mud until his throat was thick with it. To bring a knife down on the pale skin of his throat, opening red gashes like the ones already on his body, tearing the soft skin at the nape of his neck.

Too easy. The soldier was a man used to killing; he knew how to end lives a thousand different ways, each learned from practice. Yet something, some unexplainable force, stilled him. He watched the other man, confused, unsure.

He did not know why he lingered, why he waited for what was sure to follow. Had he cheated death so often that he welcomed it now, the way one might welcome a lover? What was it, the soldier demanded of himself, that bound him to this man?

He crossed his legs and waited, cradling his injured arm; it was dislocated; he could not fix it on his own. His right shoulder was beginning to ache, but he ignored the pain and focused on each steady drop of water falling from the other man’s golden hair. His lips were parted slightly, a smear of blood dried on one corner. The soldier watched, and he waited, and he listened. The iridescent insect, displeased with its travels further upstream, buzzed back over the two of them, eliciting no reaction from either.

Then: a low hum in the background, giving way to a dull roar. The air seemed to tremble with it. The noise startled the bright insect, and it flew back towards the river, now clear of smoke, quiet and ceaseless. Now the soldier’s face showed a faint touch of fear, but still he didn’t move; his muscles tensed ever so slightly, and his jaw set firmly. His eyes, perhaps unwillingly, darted around the panorama of landscape. As if to escape; as if to seek a way to flee. But he did not move.

The noise ceased as if it had been shut off by some switch. Still the soldier remained sitting next to the other, tensed and wary, ready and determined. Resolute. He was still there when the redheaded woman in a blue business suit walked out from the hollow of the trees and shot him three times in the chest.

 

**II.**

It’s three months later that the blond-haired man and the red-haired woman sit together at a table in a sparsely-furnished apartment. Her hands are on the table, as if she does not trust herself. Two mugs of now-cold coffee sit untouched between them, the visible barrier. The invisible barrier is all the things they cannot, or will not, say.

"People are starting to talk," Natasha says bluntly. She has never been one to mince words, and he knows this. "You’ve missed four of Tony’s stupid press conferences, skipped out on every formal interview except that one you did six weeks ago, refused meetings with a great number of influential people, and the public hasn’t seen your face since the last time New York almost got itself blown to bits."

"I don’t think I can do it." The words empty from his chest like ribbons. His voice has the familiar cadence of those who have lost everything. "Knowing that he’s out there . . . that he got away. I don’t think I can live, knowing that."

" _Mea culpa,_ " Natasha relents. Her tone does not sound like she is relenting, merely stating a fact. A fault. "I would have shot that son of a bitch if I hadn’t worried he would harm the civilians. Then Fury came in and I . . . I shouldn’t have let him have his moment. I should have shot him in the head instead." It is the closest she will ever come to saying _I’m sorry._

Steve shifts in his chair; his fingers wrap lifelessly around his mug. Three months. Three months, and the Winter Soldier still screams and digs his metal fingers into his own flesh when the ghosts come for him. Three months, and Natasha’s balance has come back—her easy skill, her fluid grace, returning one by one until the only thing left broken is her. Three months, and Nicholas Fury is back on his feet with the ardour of those who still hope. Three months, and Alexander Pierce still walks the earth, still breathes and speaks, still has the power to shatter the glass already lodged in Steve’s chest. Three months.

"What will you do?" asks Natasha. Her fingers flutter like birds’ wings, broken in a storm. Helpless. Useless. Worthless.

Steve shrugs and focuses his attention on the grain of wood on the table, tracing it with a fingernail. "I’m not sure. I don’t . . . I guess maybe I need to, I don’t know, retire."

Natasha’s sharply curved eyebrows lift. "Captain America, retire?" she says. "Who would represent freedom and justice and equality and all that bullshit?" A bitter jibe; she knows as well as he that he can no longer embody any of those traits honestly.

"I don’t _know,_ Natasha!" His anger is sudden; it bursts from him like a bullet from the polished barrel of a gun. Shooting the messenger in a game of Russian roulette. "I don’t know—get Sam to take my place, god knows he’s a thousand times the better man." Steve pauses, his eyes still on the table top. "I need a break. A really, really long break."

"You already had one of those," Natasha reminds him. A seventy-year sojourn in the ice. Steve scowls at her, at the placating chords of her voice, at the gentleness of the way her full lips curve up like a knife wound.

"Yes, but I didn’t get much say in the matter, did I? It’s just—Tony’s got Pepper and Rhodes. Bruce has Betty and Tony. Thor’s got an entire world full of people, not to mention Jane. Even Clint has Laura and the kids and that smart-mouthed archer, what’s her name, Kate. And who do I have, Natasha? Nobody. Nobody living, that is. A hell of a lot of ghosts, but from this century . . . nobody."

"You have Sam," Natasha states. Steve waits for the _and me_ that he knows must follow, but she does not speak the words. "And you wanted the job. Maybe it lasted a bit longer than expected, but you’re stuck with it. Whether you like it or not, Steve, you have to man up and deal with it—you have a lot of responsibilities."

"Make Sam do them," Steve says. He’s aware of how childish he sounds. _I never had a childhood,_ he argues with himself. _Let me have at least this, for now, whatever it is._ "I’m taking a vacation."

Three months, and Natasha’s smile still flashes as sharp as ice, and as insincere. "That sounds an awful lot like giving up to me, Captain," she says. The title of respect is a mockery as it passes her red lips. "That sounds an awful lot like quitting. That sounds and awful lot like walking away and letting him win."

Steve bites back his fury. "If you had actually been able to release those SHIELD files like you said you would, then we wouldn’t have this problem. Pierce wouldn’t be free; the world would know what he had done." _And what I had done,_ he adds silently. "But it’s not like that, because Fury shot Pierce in the chest and left before we knew he was dead, goddamn him. And it’s your fault too. You said it; you know."

"But we stole his prize," Natasha says. Her eyes are dark pools, lit with a fevered gleam. "We took his weapon, didn’t we? You should be happy; you have your friend back."

Something sharp twists in Steve’s stomach and stays there. "No," he says. "He stole us." _He stole me._

Natasha inhales slowly, nails spread on the table. "Do you remember," she says, "what I told you the night they brought him in?"

At least she says _they,_ he thinks; at least she distances herself from the people who have raked his heart the most and given him this particular brand of hell. "Yes," he says. He remembers the night, the night he got released from the infirmary, only hours after being admitted into it; adamant because he’d heard a rumour that the Winter Soldier was going to be brought into SHIELD headquarters that very night.

Their conversation had been the tipping point, that night: he was still in the infirmary, allowed no visitors except Natasha, for "special reasons," as the doctors put it.

His shoulders shook, silent tears traced scars down the grime still smudged on his skin. There was blood on his hands, staining the lines of his skin, hidden underneath his fingernails. "How is he?" Steve asked, conscious of the empty terror in Natasha’s eyes. "You’ve seen him, right?" He knew she had.

"He’s alive," Natasha said flatly. "How fully, I cannot say." She sat in one of the hard, wooden chairs next to the hospital bed, her face closed off. "He is a weapon. A killer. You can treat him like he’s still your best friend, but he isn’t that person anymore. Half a century was spent making him into who he is. That sort of ritual cannot be undone in a day."

Steve didn’t say that it had been, that he had seen his friend hidden behind the cold eyes of the Winter Soldier. "Well, I’m sure you’d know first-hand." A petty, bitter remark. Cruel.

Natasha’s hands jerked convulsively in her lap. "Yes," she said, no trace of emotion in her voice. "I would know. I would know better than anyone."

"He knew me," Steve says. His simple, foolish hope. "I know he knew me. Why else would he stay? He could’ve gone anywhere, and he chose to stay."

"Not with Pierce out there he couldn’t," Natasha reminds him smoothly. Her words are like the liquid river that still smothers him in his dreams, even now, even three months later. "He had no choice."

"Of course he had a choice," Steve says fiercely. His hands tighten around the surface of his mug, slippery with his sweat. "He’s not a robot."

"Not entirely," Natasha murmurs. "Not yet."

Steve watches her. Three months, and they still cannot agree on what he knows should be a simple matter. Three months, and the fear still digs at him that maybe Natasha is right and he is not. "He saved me," he whispers. "He pulled me from the water. Could have killed me right there, left me to drown, but he saved me."

"Yes," Natasha says. "Yes, I suppose he did."

There is an odd catch to her voice, but Steve chooses not to dwell on it.

 

 

 

**III.**

 

"You can’t see him."

The guard’s voice is wavering and uncertain, his eyes shifting worriedly from side to side; he is clearly out of his depth. Perhaps he is new, and does not yet know the protocol. Perhaps he does know, and disregards it. Either option is as likely as the other.

Steve leans against the smooth metal of the wall, pretending to be nonchalant in the hopes that the old saying _fake it till you make it_ isn’t fake itself. "Look, kid," he says, although the guard looks to be in his early thirties. It’s a game Natasha started a while back, to use their true ages, to confuse the others. A trivial pleasure. Something to pass the time. "You know who I am, right? There’s a special exception for me."

"On whose orders?" The guard is stubborn; Steve admires at least this. "I have my orders from the big boss ’imself, that I make sure no man goes down there ’cept for Dr Banner and Fury ’imself if he wants to. They don’t say anything about you, Captain."

"Talk to Nick if you want. He’ll take my side," Steve says. He likes to think this would be true. "I’m not asking for a goddamn position working in there forever, I just . . ." He’s become masterful at keeping his voice level in times like these, but he can make it unsteady if it helps. "I just need to see Dr Banner."

It’s the sincerity in his voice that sells the other man. It always is. Steve can see the guard hesitating, weighing his options, considering. Finally he sighs and pulls a key card from his pocket. His name tag reads ANDERS. He swipes the card against the lock, and it flashes green, bright green. A humming noise, and then the wall slides open seamlessly. "Fine. Go in. But be quick and don’t do anything stupid."

"’Course not," Steve says, as if it’s a stupid thing to say to him. He walks through the doors into the dull hallway. It is here, in the deepest corridors of the Triskelion, where artificial lights buzz on the grey ceilings, where there are few doors and fewer windows, where everything is iron or steel, where SHIELD keeps Alexander Pierce’s favourite weapon, Steve’s best friend, the Winter Soldier. But Steve is no longer positive that all the titles apply, or even any of them.

Titles have always given him particular trouble. He tries his best to see people how they really are, but sometimes, in this day and age, the ways people seem to be are so different. He likes to pretend that this is one of the things that has changed, but Steve is not stupid enough to claim this fallacy as well.

The descent brings the walls crushing towards him, claustrophobic and stifling. The halls are devoid of people, and walking down them reminds Steve of descending deep into the throat of a some giant monster. He stops in front of the smooth, plain door. _27._ Unassuming. Ordinary. Steve lets his knuckles skim the surface like butterfly wings.

Bruce opens the door with a wan smile. "Oh, Steve, come in. I’m sorry; I didn’t know you were coming today. We’ve finished the majority of the physical tests, by the way. I know you asked about those the last time you and Natasha were here."

"Yes," Steve says. He steps into the room; Bruce closes the door with a dull thud behind him. Steve takes in the bare walls, the computers, the machines. It seems more like a prison cell than a hospital. "How is he?"

"Well," Bruce says, hesitating. "I could tell you his iron levels are extremely high, his metabolism is accelerated, his brain activity is actually normal, but I’m guessing you don’t want to hear that, right? He doesn’t remember," Bruce says, and it’s like a punch to the gut, a knife to the side, a bullet in his chest, no matter how many times he’s heard this before. "Not everything. There are moments—flashes, almost—where he acts almost as if he does. But primarily it’s just little things."

"What about . . . me?" Steve reaches for the counter, for something to hold on to, to still his shaking hands. He asks the question each time, hoping that maybe one of these days the answer will change. It’s the future; can’t it be better? "Does he still not remember me?"

Bruce sighs and interlaces his fingers wearily. "I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. He says your name a lot, and talks about you—not always in good ways—but he doesn’t respond to other stimuli in that area. If I mention you, or show him pictures of you now, he doesn’t seem to make the connection."

"May I see him?" It’s a ritual now, this conversation. How they talk together, how they dance back and forth around the same unanswerable questions. "Not really a . . . I just want to see him for a moment."

"Of course," Bruce says, easily enough, but Steve notices how Bruce’s right hand goes to his belt, finds his communications unit, presses down on the button to call the guards to the door. "Go on in."

Steve walks silently to the door, reaches for the handle. Turns it. He steps into the room, telling himself _this time, this time I’ll be fine. This time I won’t break down._ The door shits with a heavy click of finality. Steve turns.

The Winter Soldier sits unfurled in a chair, his legs crossed casually at the ankles. His left arm rests on his knees; his right arm, the human one, grips the metal fingers as if they’ll escape if not watched constantly. His hair shadows his face, and his eyes are the dark turmoil of the sky just before a storm. Every inch of his body speaks of wariness and distrust.

His voice is low and cold, slightly confused, but the uncertainty is well-hidden. "Why are you here?"

Steve almost flinches back against the wall, but holds his ground. "I wanted to see you," he says. Not a flicker in those deep brown eyes. From where Steve is standing, he can almost imagine they’re black instead of brown—someone else’s eyes, not the chocolate ones of his best friend. Wishful thinking, maybe. "I wanted to talk to you."

A nod of acceptance; he waits for Steve to continue. Steve swallows, shifts his hands, considers what to say. "Do you remember," he begins, then rashly changes his words, rearranges his phrasing. "What do you remember?"

Now a whisper of that uncertainty crosses the Winter Soldier’s face. His posture straightens; the plates in his arm shift with faintly menacing clicks. He sits forwards in his chair, the storm in his eyes swirling dangerously. "You’re not Pierce," he says.

"No," Steve says. For all his efforts, his voice breaks.

"Who are you?" That question again, the one we ask of others, but not often enough of ourselves. "If you’re not Pierce." The words are flat, dulled. Meaningless.

Steve bites down on his lips so hard that he tastes blood pooling on his tongue—rust and salt, intoxicating. "You know me," he whispers through the blood in his mouth. "It’s . . . it’s me, Steve. I . . . I remember you."

"You were the man on the bridge," says the Winter Soldier. "From the Helicarrier."

"Yes," Steve whispers.

A tightness covers the Winter Soldier’s face, a refusal. He sinks back down in the chair, the storm abating momentarily. His eyes sweep the room, coming to rest on Steve’s face, scrutinising him. "I don’t know you," he says.

Steve doesn’t say _yes you do_ the way he used to, when things fell down this well-intentioned path. He studies the Winter Soldier right back. The voice, the face even, Bucky’s. But the lithe movements, the calculated actions, that of the Winter Soldier. It is as if the creature in front of him is half-man and half-machine, half-friend and half-foe, a blend of new and old.

The eyes, cold and dark, are the most different. There is only pain in them, no memory, no affection. They are not the eyes of the person Steve loved more than life itself, would love even after death. Steve Rogers was in love with the brown-eyed boy with the devil’s smirk who fell from a train seventy-something years ago. Bucky Barnes was in love with the skinny blond boy who could neither stay out of a fight nor win one. But now, in the new world nearly three quarters of a century after those boys were supposed to die, Steve can’t keep their ghosts connected to who they are.

Steve knows that he loves Bucky, that he’s always loved Bucky, and that the Winter Soldier is his formulated enemy to be feared and killed, even. But he doesn’t know what to do with this new person who seems to be a combination of the two.

He looks down at his hands. The Winter Soldier—it is simplest to call him that, he has discovered—shifts slightly in his seat, waiting for orders. Waiting for his purpose to be reassigned. Waiting.

The trouble, Steve knows, is that he’s always tried to find a definition for everything, for everyone. And he’s had a definition for _Bucky_ even before he knew that what he felt surpassed mere friendship, crossed the border into love: the fiery-eyed, smart-mouthed boy who always showed up right when Steve needed him, the boy who cared far more than he would ever admit, who went out dancing to pretend that everything was okay, who always knew what to do even if he couldn’t, or didn’t know how to, do it.

This, he remembers. It took a long time for Bucky to die, he knows this too. But somewhere along the line, his best friend fell out of the forefront of his mind. There were other things: missions, meetings, kills. Other people: Natasha, Sam, Sharon. And now, the person that’s with him now is so different that he doesn’t know who it is any more. He knew Bucky like the back of his hand, could sketch him from memory a thousand times over, would recognise him by touch, by smell, by feeling alone, wherever and whenever they were.

Nowadays Steve has found it difficult to connect that image, that person, with the illusion that continues to surround the Winter Soldier: the militaristic machine, fed on Stockholm syndrome, raised to kill, and bent on destroying him. The hollow-eyed survivor sitting in the chair across from him, with the long hair and the glint of metal and the lean muscle, is nothing but a mix. A mockery, blatantly haunting the people they used to be.

But such thoughts are too out-of-place, too dark, for such times. "I’m going to go now," Steve says, moving back until his fingers scrabble against the smooth handle of the door. "I’ll be back soon, okay?"

The Winter Soldier raises his chin almost unperceptively. A minor defiance. Perhaps he would have been beaten for it, before. Hit until his blood ran red lines down his skin. "I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone," he says. The words are cut off, sharp, like an owl biting through bone with its beak. "I work best alone."

"Right," Steve says. He cannot say more, not in this drab and empty room, not with this alien creature wearing the skin of his best friend, not with those eyes on him. "I’ll . . . still see you. Later, I guess." He backs out of the room, tears prickling in his eyes like thorns, and runs into Bruce.

"How did it go?" Likely as not Bruce has been listening to every word, watching every movement, noting every gesture that passed between them, but he has the courtesy to pretend otherwise. "At least you’re still in one piece. How is he?"

"The same." The words crawl blindly from his throat, and Steve grits his teeth as if to keep them in. "He . . . he remembers me, but he doesn’t know me."

"I’m sorry," Bruce says. Probably he means it.

Steve shakes his head, suddenly desperate to escape the menacing buzz of the lights, the faint stench of medicines and sedatives, the blankness of the metal halls. "It’s . . . I’ll come back later. I need to, I need to talk to Sam," he invents rapidly, wrapping his fingers around his wrist. A hopeful excuse. "He said I could borrow the wings for a while."

"Flying lessons." Bruce nods and reaches for a clipboard. "Have fun. I’ll keep you posted."

"Thanks," Steve says dully, the words heavy and empty.  He’s thinking about what Bucky said. _You were the man on the bridge. From the Helicarrier._ Perhaps not a full recovery, but it could be something. It could be a start. Or it could be another nothing.

When armed guards first brought the Winter Soldier into SHIELD, he was unarmed and afraid, half-feral and wary but willing to be taken into custody. Steve stood with Natasha in the hall and watched him walk by, marked the blood and pain and dirt smeared all over. "I nearly killed him," Natasha hissed into Steve’s ear, "three Widow’s Bites straight to the chest—it’s a marvel that he could survive that level of electricity."

As if he had heard her words, the Winter Soldier stopped and fixed them both with a look of such naked confusion that suddenly Steve couldn’t stop himself from calling out, _Bucky, it_ ’ _s me, it’s Steve,_ but he wasn’t sure that the burnt-out shell of a person standing in front of him with that storm brewing in his eyes was _Bucky_ any more.

And that lack or recognition hurt almost as much as what came next. _Natalia,_ the Winter Soldier gasped sharply, then he surged forwards and the guards yelled and scrambled to grab on to his arms, hesitant and almost squeamish to touch the metal, calling for backup and struggling, while the Winter Soldier kept saying _Natalia, Natalia,_ over and over, and it hurt because after all of that, it was Natasha that he remembered, not Steve.

Three months it’s been, and things have changed, and the world has slowly begun to rebuild itself, brick by hollowed brick. And the person who lives with them now is some disconcerting amalgam of Bucky and the Winter Soldier, some puzzle pieced together with fragments from two different boxes. It’s created an entirely new person, one whom Steve has to relearn how to know and how to love.

Steve Rogers loved Bucky Barnes, everyone knows this to be nothing but true. But _loved_ is a lot different from _loves,_ and the tense of the verb is not the only thing which is standing in his way.

 

 

**IV.**

 

The water burns, after a while. It grows and expands in his lungs and stabs down into his chest, ripping flesh and replacing the blood with cold, dark liquid. The river washes over him, transcending everything, wiping away everything.

It’s like Lethe, he thinks. He remembers sitting quietly with someone else, poring over an old encyclopaedia, reading the myth of the river that could wash away memories. Their fingers skimming the pictures, rubbing against the embossing, the painted faces, distilled in time and ink. Their cheeks brushing, hair tickling his neck, breath on his skin. Their voices combining, telling the story over and over. This is a myth. This is a legend. This is where monsters find themselves when they have nowhere else to go.

The pages of the book have flaked away, fractured into dust and nothing, he is sure. Lying in the river, mouth forming the words, he misses the stories they used to tell. He misses the time when the river was not such a welcome absolution, a hopeful exculpation: Lethe, where he wishes he could swim each morning, to remove the ugly dark stains of dreams from the inside of his skull. Lethe, where he wishes he could drown.

This, he remembers. And other, less tangible things: the gentle whisper of fingers brushing his bruised knuckles, cresting across the discoloured skin, where others’ fists had met his face; the faint scent of cologne that clings to his clothes as well, so that he falls into sleep each night with the smell drifting into his dreams; the glow of a cigarette, silhouetting the rusting skeleton of a fire escape in the musky dark of a summer night—his favourite model, his deepest wound, his loneliest ghost.

Lethe is just another ghost, like the dark flash of metal and blood and ice, just another ghost that crawls inside his lungs at night and strangles him, cutting off his air. But the difference is that this, _this_ he sometimes believes might save him.

 

 

 

**V.**

 

Natasha intercepts him in the hall, dropping lightly from a vent in the ceiling and falling into step beside him. She’s dressed in black, perfume trailing from her like invisible ribbons, lipstick smeared on her mouth. "Where are you going?"

"To find Sam," Steve says, realising that he will actually have to find Sam if he continues to tell people that he will. "He said a while ago he was gonna let me use the wings." This, at least, is not a lie: Sam has offered, many times. "I thought I finally would." This, this part, is the lie.

Natasha slips in front of him, halting him in front of the door to the glass elevator. She puts a slender hand on his chest. Her nails are painted red; they look as if they have been dipped in blood, then diamonds. "He’s at his house. I’ll come with you."

"How did you know that?" Stalling, buying time. But isn’t that all he ever does?

She removes her hand and presses the elevator button. "Modern tech, Cap. Cell phones. I texted him asking if we could meet sometime for dinner, and he said I had to come over to his place for real cooking. So I’m extending that invitation."

"Oh." Steve studies the knife-like curve of her jaw, the rubicund smugness of her lips. The elevator door opens soundlessly, and Natasha holds her hand against the wall to keep it from closing as the two of them step in. "Are you . . . are you two . . ."

Natasha’s laugh is as brittle as dead leaves. "Of course not. I’m still devoted to the assassin who was sent to kill me but with whom I ended up falling in love instead. I hear you’re familiar with the feeling. Also I have unpleasant news to tell you, which is best told where you can’t break SHIELD property."

"I’m not—Bucky and I aren’t—"

It’s pointless to lie. Steve does it anyway. It’s what he’s good for, these days. Maybe he’s been spending too much time around Natasha.

The elevator slides smoothly up the shaft like some sleep monster climbing a liquid ladder. Natasha laughs again, forced and without meaning. "Sam offered to make lasagne for dinner. We might as well take him up on his offer, don’t you think?"

"You said you had unpleasant news," Steve says belatedly. The words sink in like pebbles in a pond. "Is it about—" The name sticks in his throat. "Is it about Pierce?"

Natasha’s silence is answer enough, and a rippling chill rushes down his spine. She tilts her head forwards slightly, and her long hair falls to cover her face in a crimson curtain. "I can’t tell you here."

Steve puts a hand on the clear wall and watches the city rise. "How bad? Tell me that, at least."

"Better than it could be, I suppose, considering," Natasha admits. "Still unpleasant. It could have the potential to get much worse if it perpetuates. And funny that you should mention your assassin, because it directly concerns you both."

"Did Fury say something?" Dread begins to trickle over him. It feels like the dark water from his nightmares. "Natasha—I don’t— _please_ tell me."

"When we get to Sam’s," Natasha decides. Steve thinks he catches a glimpse of worry in her eyes, but she readjusts the mental mask and whatever it was is gone. "I need to clean up, anyway—that last mission was a big fucking mistake."

Steve removes his hand from the wall; the glass is slick with condensation and sweat. He understands that _mission_ is synonymous with _kill_ from the hollowed-out look in her eyes. "Natasha."

"Steve." She leans bonelessly against the smooth glass pane, and for a moment she is the person whom Steve knew, or thought he knew, before the most recent debauchery—the Winter Soldier, Pierce, Clint, Fury, Loki, Schmidt, Tony, Ultron. He can take his pick, these days. "I’ve really got a craving for good home-cooked lasagne."

"Fine," Steve says relentingly, understanding her underlying message: she doesn’t want to talk about it right now. He looks up at the clear ceiling, at the sky rushing towards them. "Let’s go visit Sam, then."

Natasha smiles again, like a shark that knows that blood will be in the water soon enough. "That’s the plan," she says.

 

 


End file.
